So I meant to do one of these a long time ago, but as my Skype Shadowrun group, consisting of myself, Longes, Rad, Imp, and one non-Denner (but still sane individual) has almost entered its first year (and sadly only our second story arc), I figured better late than never. So let's get on with it!

For completions sake, the system is Shadowrun Fourth, and the year is 2070. This chronicle takes place in the first few months of the new decade.

A breakdown of the crew:

Myself, the inestimable Vagrant as GM.
Longes, as a pointy-earned Jack of all Trades, master of quite a few - an adept specialising in both hacky and talky known as Foxhound who looks like a Solid Snake ripoff with pointy ears and colour-changing hair.
Rad, playing Null, the technomantic amnesiac ork rigger who spends all his time in an abomination known as a 'bikemech' (speaking of which, if anyone can find me an appropriate image for a bike with a walker add-on, I'd be much obliged. Because I haven't and honestly, the idea hurts my brain.)
Imp, casted as Walks-The-Pavement, an appropriately foul and perverted street shaman of the Dark Goddess and hailing from the barrens of Redmond.
Rob, acting as the chromed to the gills bushido Oni Street Sam Akagane.

Bit of background: The crew has recently chartered a t-bird from Seattle to Neo-Tokyo, after getting a lead about a very lucrative, six-figure extraction gig. Said illegal interincontinental metahuman smuggling flight has run into a few problems...

After fighting off a few cyberpirate (the actual kind with boats and guns) harrassers whilst passing by Hawaii, the route their t-bird smuggler captain had taken (a fat and jolly dwarven Swede by the name of Jorg Jorgensen) involved curving by the Northern Philipines, ostentiously to avoid the over-active JIS patrols that had suddenly become more frequent due to the recent loss of San Fransisco. Unfortunately, the Philipines is currently riven by civil war, between Filipino nationalists and the pro-Japanese Imperialists. This presents a problem for international smuggling, but fortunately Jorg Jorgensen had the answer - a friendly nationalist officer who tags the t-bird as a friendly while they pass by the Philipines (at least in Nationalist-controlled waters.)

Unfortunately, said officer's ship, which was not far from their position, was currently being boarded by an Imperialist militia, and was in danger of being overrun. The runners decided an intervention had better chances of survival than risking a fly-through of Nationalist waters without a friendly tagged, and decided to save the Nationalist officer. The t-bird lowered itself as close to the deck of the ship, (a converted megayacht, it seemed), and the runners dropped into a warzone.

They landed in a rain-and-gunfire soaked stern, with a few of the ship's defenders dying to Imperialist gunfire moments before their boots touched down. The runners barely had time to get under cover before the Imperialists turned their guns on them - but then the bikemech, a troll-sized monstrosity of armor and shielding, and mounted with that retardedly broken WAR battle rifle I forgot to ban in chargen, laughed off their puny bullets and wiped out two of the six. Akagane burst another two down, though he took a few bullets to his side (not that it mattered, he's more chrome than ork.) Foxhound decided to be creative and swooped around, setting up a monowire trap for reinforcements running up the side stairwells. One of them fell for it, losing a leg, and the other decided discretion was the better part of valour and retreaded down to the mid-deck.

The runners checked their ammo and stripped a few corpses - all Imperialist soldiers that, while ethnically Filipino, wore JIS colours and used Japanatech guns, moderately chromed with cheap muscle replacements and dermal plating.

Akagane, being bulky and mostly metal, headed down first, not managing to sneak by the waiting sentries on the bottom level. They let loose a torrent of firepower, but missed, and the big oni got a chance to move into cover and mow one of them down with a long burst from an HVAR. Foxhound followed second, crouching into cover and using his magically-attuned senses to scout out the place - the room they'd descended into held six soldiers, with another three in the next one - and managed to wound another Imperialist. Null followed last, throwing himself down the stairwall (because he wouldn't fit otherwise) - but unfortunately, he didn't get a chance to straighten before two soldiers shredded the mech he was in with a double full burst, leaving the thus-far invincible bikemech a pile of scrap metal and displaying the fucking stupidity of non-scaling damage and vehicle damage rules, which I then resolved to house-rule when next session comes along. Null himself was fine, as his rigger cocoon and the mech itself had soaked the gunfire, though he wasn't very helpful in the firefight. Instead, he commanded his microdrone, a small spy-ball to detach from the mech and scout out the rest of the ship, discovered that a long, narrow corridor led to the bridge - the place the runners were heading - was lined with soldiers, and at the very end, an Imperialist with a readied Striker, which he'd probably pulled after the comm reports of the mech above-deck.

It was at that point that Foxhound realised that bringing a rocket launcher on a boat and then standing behind all your comrades was a tactically poor, but potentially lulzy decision, and began to implement the lulz. He dropped down behind cover and began to hack the Imperialist with the rocket launcher's comm - unfortunately, it was slaved to a command node on the boarding ship connected to this one, which entailed a few seconds of scanning, interception, decrypting, and spoofing. (By the way, are the spoof rules in Unwired dumb? I honestly think they're dumb. I think most of that book is dumb and nonsense.)

During this time, Akagane had engaged a few Imperialists in a combination of shooting them in the face and slashing them in the face with a nodachi, when they got stupid and popped their cyberblades and tried to stab him, yelling 'Die you monster demon fuck' in Japanese the entire while. (The Imperialists, not Akagane, to whom being a monster demon fuck was more or less a random magigenetic event.) He'd managed to neutralise a further three, leaving only three alive in this room. Null had taken the time to whistle up a Crack sprite and a Machine sprite, with instructions for the Crack sprite to hack its way into the boarding ship's engine controls, with the Machine sprite on the ready to jack into the boarding ship once the Crack sprite had done its job.

Foxhound, (because at this point it was actually the third or fourth combat turn, officially marking the longest combat I've ever seen in Shadowrun, considering that all three runners had 3 IPs each), had actually managed to hack something in combat time (relatively) and triggered the rocket launcher, which blasted off and exploded, sending a gout of fire and death shooting down the main corridor and toasting a good five or six Imperialists standing in the way. The Imperialists comm channels erupted in cries of 'Mage' and 'Demons!' (Though in reality, they were hacked, but their onboard hacker was apparently not as good at his job as Foxhound was at his).

It was then a simple task for Akagane to clean up the rest of the Imperialists, while the Crack and Machine sprites managed to gain access to the ship's systems, take them order and set a full speed course correction for the nearest coast, and change the passcodes and administrative overrides. (If you're wondering, the Crack sprite had actually glitched on its Compiling roll vs Null, and I decided to rule that as a free bound Sprite, giving him an extra slot to call up a Machine sprite. His Crack sprite resembled a lockpick with a cartoon face, and his Machine sprite a commlink with a cartoon face. I made them all sound like Mickey Mouse.)

The boarding ship tore away from the Nationalists with a screech of tearing and breaking metal, as the connected boarding ramps were torn off and cast into the unquiet seas. Foxhound, now finished with the interminible amount of hacking he'd done, used Commanding Voice followed by an Intimidate action to force the remaining Imperialist survivors to surrender, which they did. After zip-tying and divesting the remaining Imperialist forces of concievable weaponry, (obviously save for the implanted hand blades, but they didn't seem to have stomach for a longer fight after their ship had left and their comrades barbequed), the runners approached the bridge, which had been blocked off by rubble from the mis-timed rocket blast...

We ended the session there due to time - I'm hoping to resolve the whole boat-jacking scene and maybe finally arrive to Neo-Tokyo next session._________________Then, once you have absorbed the lesson, that your so-called "friends" are nothing but meat sacks flopping around in the fashion of an outgassing corpse, pile all of your dice and pencils and graph-paper in the corner and SET THEM ON FIRE. Weep meaningless tears.